


it came with strings

by bestworstcase (windrattlestheblinds)



Category: Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure (Cartoon)
Genre: Gen, so i wrote my own, times 4, times three, tonight’s episode didn’t have a cass stinger, uh... times two
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-10
Updated: 2019-10-17
Packaged: 2020-12-12 04:08:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20974364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/windrattlestheblinds/pseuds/bestworstcase
Summary: The training sessions with little miss blue aren’t going so well.





	1. Chapter 1

The first time the spirit grasped her hand and told her she must embrace her rage to master the moonstone’s power, Cass thought it would be easy; she had been swimming in anger since she left Corona, first from nerves frayed by Eugene’s incessant picking and then the silent seething black river of fury she'd been choking on since the Great Tree, and when she plunged into it the earth trembled and roared and unsheathed its claws for her.

It left her sweating and shaking and gasping so hard for air that for a moment she thought she'd die, but it felt like progress.

Now, after an eternity of gloomy days and gloomier nights, Cass laughs bleakly at the memory of that bitter optimism. She has scraped herself dry of every last drop of fury and now all that's left is an impotent irritation with herself; the black rocks stay black and Cass is back to pushing until her heart feels like it'll burst with nothing to show for it.

Exhausted from her latest effort, she lets her quivering body drop and lies limp and panting in the dirt. Her head is pillowed by a tuft of grass and it's the most comfortable she's been in—months, it feels like. Cass lost count of the days a long time ago.

She closes her eyes.

_”Cassandra.”_

The familiar sing-song shreds the pleasant thoughtless fog of not-quite-sleep, and it's _too much_. Cass clamps her hands over her ears and whimpers, “Please just let me _sleep_.”

“You're still doing it wrong.” Something cold and misty ghosts over her cheek and then sinks into her flesh, and Cass snaps upright with a low wail. The spirit pats her cheek again, stern reproof in her eyes. “You need to embrace your darkness, Cassandra. What is holding you back?”

“I'm so tired,” Cass says, pleading. Being upright makes her head swim; shadows pulse weirdly in her eyes.

“Perhaps I was wrong about you,” the spirit murmurs. “I truly thought you could do this, Cassandra, but...”

Cass stiffens. Her tiredness peels away, not fading exactly but rolling to the side as her chest tightens with a familiar and _awful_ dread. “I can do it. I _can_. I just—”

The problem is she doesn't _hate_ Rapunzel, no matter how much she should, no matter how hard she tries.

“Then prove it,” the spirit says, nodding at the patch of unbroken ground where Cass had collapsed. She smiles and steps out of the way.

Cass swallows a sob—a physical reaction to pushing through exhaustion, she tells herself, _nothing more_—and reaches for what's left of her anger.


	2. Chapter 2

“Cassandra!”

Wearily, Cass looks up from the stream and into the spirit’s blue gaze. She looks stern as ever, but badly-hidden irritation simmers behind her eyes. Cass can't find it in herself to care.

“What.”

The spirit purses her lips. “I don't understand why you aren't taking this seriously, Cassandra,” she says, reaching out to place her tiny hand over Cass’s fingers. “You know what will happen if you can't master the moonstone's power.”

“I'm taking this seriously,” Cass protests, but the spirit continues relentless.

“The black rocks will continue to grow. Either they will destroy everything, or you will have to crawl back to Corona and tell everyone that _you weren't good enough_. Imagine that, Cassandra. Imagine how that will feel.”

“Stop it.”

“I wonder what Rapunzel will say when you tell her you were too _weak_ to do it after all. Maybe if you grovel enough she’ll take you back instead of hanging you for treason. You'll be a servant again, exactly where you bel—”

“I said _STOP!_”

Her chest sparks and Cass is thrown off her feet when the ground heaves; her head cracks against something hard. For a moment she lies dazed.

When her vision clears, Cass finds herself lying in a circle of jagged rocks, still aglow with power. The spirit hovers at her feet, and a pleased smile spreads slowly across her face as the rocks fade to black.

“There,” she says, with deep satisfaction. “That's more like it.”


	3. Chapter 3

Every few days Cass uncovers fossils of the nation the moonstone destroyed. Moldering farmhouses reduced to rubble. Impaled wagons rotting in the dim and distant sunlight. Old roads half overtaken by weeds. A well, once, its waters unpalatably bitter when she tasted them. Cass picks over these carcasses of history, vulture-like, and the spirit hovers at her side in uncharacteristic silence.

Today, as the sun slinks to its slumber and Cass drags herself over the crest of a steep hill, she trips over a long, flat stone set in the ground and goes sprawling.

(Exhaustion makes you clumsy, her father said often, her father her father her father—setting bedtimes until the day she came of age.)

“Look,” the spirit murmurs.

Cass blinks, and obeys.

It takes her a moment, in the long dull shadows of the evening, to understand what she sees. Rocks, not the violent claws of the moonstone but rounded and smooth, rise from the earth in neat rows. An orchard of stones.

A graveyard.

Her skin crawls as she threads a path between the overgrown graves. In Corona, the dead are lashed to funeral barges and sailed into the sunrise, and if Cass doesn't believe the bit about returning them to the sun who birthed them she can at least appreciate the efficacy of their disposal. She thinks of the dead rotting in the cold dark ground and —

“Cassandra,” the spirit says, and Cass does not at all like the gentleness of her tone. “You must think more of yourself. These people died centuries ago, yet you feel a keener sadness for them than you allow for _yourself_.” She takes Cass by the hand, each finger a tiny pinprick of ice; her eyes grow large and misty with a sympathy Cass hasn't seen since the House. “All this time I've thought that you couldn't summon your anger because you were _afraid_ of it, but that isn't true at all, is it?”

“I’m not angry anymore,” Cass mutters. She's burnt herself down to cold, cold ashes.

“I see that now,” the spirit says. “The wounds she left on you go so much deeper than I realized.”

Cass frowns. “What do you mean?”

“You truly _do_ consider yourself beneath her,” the spirit replies, so softly, so _gently_. “You can't stay angry with her because deep, deep down, you think she deserved everything she took from you. Your hand. Your power. Even your dignity.” She tips her head to one side, as if listening to the frantic hammering of Cass’s heart. “Oh, Cassandra. I am so _sorry_.”

Her pity makes Cass writhe down to her very soul, and there's a ringing in her head and a darkness behind her eyes; and it's true, isn't? How many times has Cass stepped aside for Rapunzel, sacrificed for Rapunzel, locked herself away to spare Rapunzel even the slightest discomfort?

She yanks her hand out of the spirit's grasp and runs, weeds and gravestones catching at her feet; she cannot outpace the spirit, cannot escape that chiming voice in her head, but now, for now, for now the wind whistling in her ears drowns out all the buried things she doesn't want to feel.


	4. Chapter 4

It's a long road back to Corona, and Cass isn't sure quite when she chose to follow it but she plods along it now, day and night without sleeping; she has passed through exhaustion and into the strange thoughtlessness of a waking dream.

The spirit drifts beside her, a more constant companion than even Owl, now. She talks, and Cass listens when she can summon the energy to focus.

Days and weeks and months smear into a featureless slurry of time lost and forgotten; her mind is riddled with sinkholes, yawning pits of darkness where her memories fell away. Every step she takes down the dusty road encompasses the whole world.

She is well out of the Dark Kingdom when she stumbles into the bandits.

Half a dozen brutes in tattered green cloaks materialize from the thick brush on either side of the road, and Cass has just enough left of herself to feel shamed by her own inattentiveness; then the tallest of them brandishes his cudgel and suggests that a sword like _that_ is wasted on a pretty girl like herself.

“I don't have time for this,” the spirit says, in a childish little sing song. “Do you?”

“No,” Cass mutters, and draws her sword.

The moonstone sparks in her chest, and Cass blinks, and it is over just like that. Six spears of black rock jutting from the ground, slick with blood. Six gurgling cries ringing in her ears.

She stares dully at the impaled bodies for a long time, until her tired mind can make sense of what she sees; then she sheathes the shadowblade and stumbles away to be violently sick on the side of the road.

This isn't what she wanted. This isn't what she wanted at all.


End file.
